Category Archives: Uncategorized

Catherine Nguyen has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (2021-2022) for her project, Children Born of War, Adoptees Made by War: Vietnamese Diasporic Contestations of Empire and Race.   Catherine’s project investigates the Vietnamese mixed-race child and the transracial adoptee as the figures through which France and the United States negotiate citizenship and refugee displacementContinue reading “Catherine Nguyen named 2021-2022 ACLS Fellow”

This article examines the problematization of, and the proposed solutions to, cultural métissage in the first published Vietnamese Francophone novel, Le roman de mademoiselle Lys (1921). It investigates how the author, Nguyen Phan Long, founder of the Constitutionalist Party of Cochinchina, uses French syntax as a rhetorical means of disciplining Vietnamese women in French Indochina. I interpret hisContinue reading “New publication by Angelica Pisey So: ‘L’éducation de nos filles’ in Colonial French Indochina”

France-Vietnam: Bibliothèque des flamboyants is a bilingual digital library (French-Vietnamese) exploring the cultural, historical, colonial, and scientific interactions between France and Vietnam from the 17th century to 1954. A collaboration between the French and Vietnamese National Libraries, the project is part of the “Patrimoines Partagés” collection, which bears witness to the historical and ongoing relations between France and the world.  Led by Nguyen, headContinue reading “Nguyen Giang Huong launches France-Vietnam: Bibliothèque des flamboyants”

Focused on the experience and legacies of the Khmer Rouge marriage policy, this essay examines Cambodia’s culture of silence surrounding gender-based violence in the era of #MeToo and highlights a set of cultural responses that confront silence, countering it with a multifaceted mode of expression that aims to unite survivors across communities, generations, and experiences. SpanningContinue reading “New publication by Leslie Barnes: Reckoning with Forced Marriage in the Era of #MeToo”

Organized by ASERN members Elizabeth Collins and Howie Tam, and including papers by Leslie Barnes and Catherine Nguyen, this panel spanned cultures and continents, exploring connections, perspectives, and solidarities among francophone Asian writers, filmmakers, artists, and activists in the Francosphere today. What might it mean to be “Asian” in the francophone world, and how are these questionsContinue reading “ASERN at the 20th and 21st French and Francophone Studies Conference”

As Vietnam was caught in wartime narrative austerity from the 1950s to the 1970s, followed by the communist state’s intolerance of dissent, Vietnamese writers in the French and American diaspora have offered literary texts that challenge both Vietnamese discursive stricture and dominant perspectives in France and the United States. This essay studies two novel sequencesContinue reading “New publication by Howie Tam: Literary Nationalisms”

Karl Britto has recently joined the editorial boards of two new publishing initiatives involving The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). DVAN is collaborating with Kaya Press to publish diasporic literary works, especially in translation; the first will be an English translation of Line Papin’s Les os des filles, which is slated to appear this year in the Ink & BloodContinue reading “New DVAN publishing initiatives”

This article explores how Franco-Cambodian cartoonist Tian’s graphic novel, L’année du lièvre [Year of the Rabbit], represents second-generation postmemory in the form of, what I call, a “Cambodian family album,” or a personal-collective archive. The album serves to convey to subsequent generations: 1) the history of the Cambodian genocide, 2) the collective memories of pre-1975 Cambodia preceding the Khmer Rouge takeoverContinue reading “New publication by Angelica Pisey So: Cambodian Family Albums”

In 1939, Phạm Duy Khiêm volunteered to enlist in the French army, the first and only Vietnamese colonial subject to do so. Before the war, he had studied in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École normale supérieure, and had already begun to establish himself as an important francophone intellectual and writer. His military service was cut short by France’s surrender, but it nonethelessContinue reading “New publication by Karl Britto: ‘Madame, je ne suis pas une jeune fille’”

In this evocative memoir, Kim Lefèvre recounts her childhood and adolescence growing up in colonial Viet Nam. As a little girl living with her Vietnamese mother, she doesn’t understand the reactions of others toward her, their open mistrust, contempt, and rejection. Though she feels no different from those around her, she comes to understand that to Vietnamese sheContinue reading “Recent publication by Jack Yeager: Kim Lefèvre’s White Métisse”